Sigmar-Tide

So I did a tad more digging into this new LE and its background to see what I could find out and stumbled upon some other info/rumors in the process and thought I’d share.

First off Sigmarzeit (Sigmar-tide) marks the first day of summer on the Imperial Calendar and lasts 33 days. Its the 18th day of the fourth month and is celebrated with the symbolic crowning of Sigmar as the emperor of the Empire. There is naturally room for plenty of fluff quests for Order here taking players from Sigmar’s Temple to retrieve streamers and party hats and /pray over enemy bodies for this one; however, one has to wonder how Destro’s version of anything would fit in for this. Also since we already have a SC in the IC (the Eternal Citadel) one could possibly reason that Mythic could make a counter SC in Altdorf with a similar nature.

Secondly, while digging I stumbled upon someone’s comment that they prodded a contact they had in Bioware Mythic and found out some info regarding future PvE expansions. Now this is just a rumor, but from what I read I am really worried about where this will take WAR. Two phrases leaped out at me which screamed LotD and TI (i.e. PvE flops poorly received) – ‘PvE dungeon/lairs’ and ‘random quests based on which realm has control’. Dungeons/lairs, ok. Dungeons/lairs with the existing crappy God-awful loot-roll systems? Not ok. Dungeons are plagued with two massive red flags which create massive animosity towards them – buggy-as-hell NPCs, and horrid loot systems. Every player has their share of stories of farming so-and-so dungeon ‘x’ times only to never finish their set because a piece always dropped for a class not there. You want my tale of woe? Sewers of Altdorf (Keeper) – soloed each wing about 5-8x before finishing; Gunbad (Redeye) – took almost 20 runs to get final piece, boots; Bastion Stair (Bloodlord) farmed the middle wing dozens of times (upwards of 4+dozen…) before I got my helm and chest pulling people’s teeth each time to run it; Sigs/WBT (Sentinel) – 8 months to get last piece, boots; LV (Dark Promise) upwards of 20 kills on Dralel for last piece, boots; ToVL (Tyrant) – over a year of ToVL runs and 18 boss 8 kills for the chest piece. PvE loot-table = crap. I do not want to spend another year farming a set which is obsolete in comparison to RvR sets.

And then there is the phrase ‘random quest lines based on who has control’. Ok random quests I guess are meant to keep players interested in the dungeon because every time is something new, I see your reasoning behind that. However, quest lines based on which realm has control? Holy crap, Mythic. For how bloody long has the community been asking you to remove the stupid lockout-system on LotD?! Have you learned absolutely nothing from LotD?! When this map opened up (marketed as the hip new RvR lake people were dying to get in to purge the invaders) it killed RvR; you locked the zone and the RvR lakes emptied of your faction as you went into LotD and killed the enemy, they went back to the empty RvR lakes to lock a few zones to flip back control half an hour later, and you had this cycle of locking empty zones to purge the enemy from this horrid map. After LotD WAR suffered its first huge population drop. Then we got TI with its random opening mechanism, again marketed as a PvP ZONE (not tiny ass encounter) where you fought tooth and nail against skaven and enemy players. And what do people do in TI? They leave when there is opposition because they want free gear. We do not want to bloody lock PvE-zones anymore. We do not want to farm resources to control a map for PvE dungeon access. If this rumor pans out to have any truth in it, it will be received as well as LotD and TI (both were followed by massive population drops).

This rumored new dungeon is scheduled for September. Technically speaking Sigmar-tide can be a stepping stone towards this September LE much like the Bitter Rivals and Beyond the Sands were part of the Call to Arms and led to LotD. Please, for the sake of the game, stop thinking of new PvE content to inject into a RvR based game and consider fixing existing PvE AND most of all fixing existing PvP! Too many classes are unbalanced. Doomflayer and Warpforged are unbalanced. RvR is boring. And then rumors reach me that Mythic is working on new dungeons with realm control… Let me guess, next we’ll start hearing about Mythic’s ingenious plan to retain players by increasing the RR cap to 200….